From the moment I said I was getting a dog, the only question I’ve been posed is “what is the cat going to think?”  No one seems to care too much about, for example,  how I am going to have time to write when the adorable little piss machine feels the need to arf and chew and bite all the blessed day long, or what might happen if my non-pet-having apartment managers find out I am smuggling yet another animal into this skank-ass place.

So, Flannery and the dog.  She reacts to him pretty much the way she does all males–hissing and hiding.  Just ask Z or SC.  She’s got no love.  Egon, on the other hand, follows her sweetly around, anxiously a-wag, sniffing and flopping his adorable ears in her general direction.  He has become enamored of her portly feline form, and can imagine nothing better than burying his snout in her luxuriant grey belly.  As ever, she remains surly and intractable. It’s a tale as old as time: love unrequited, snuffles spurned.

Yet, inexplicably, she lurks outside the door and peers in at her clumsy suitor, occasionally releasing a mournful howl and then retreating, chagrined.  She yearns, but knows he’s not mature enough to meet her needs.  A discerning philosopher like Flannery necessarily demands a companion well versed in the finer things in life:  the difference between a sneaker and a pork-chop flavored chew bone, for example, and which local pinot to pair therewith, or the subtleties of not pissing near where one eats.

Now, long after the puppy has finally been cheated into sleep, she perches on the foot of my bed, with a ghost of longing in her kitten sighs.  I can only imagine what sweet visions flit through her dreams–endless buffets filled with tasty doxie rump roast where no one has to read Heidegger, ever. Pass the mustard.